Telefonica SA today denied it is discussiong a merger with Dutch telco KPN. This weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that Telefonica is making a $24bn bid for the Dutch company. Initially, both KPN and Telefonica declined to comment. Now, a Telefonica spokesman tells the financial news service AFX "that we want to deny that there have been talks with KPN".

Astronomers at the WM Keck Observatory have identified a moon orbiting Xena, a body they argue is the 10th planet in our solar system. They have called the moon Gabrielle, after Xena's sidekick in the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess.

Three Novell OpenSUSE community web site were defaced on Sunday by politically motivated hackers. Defacement archive Zone-H reports that a group called IHS Iran Hackers Sabotage broke into OpenSUSE.org, wiki.novell.com and forge.novell.com to post a message stating that it was Iran's right to develop nuclear power. All three sites were defaced in the same way (archive here).

Despite it's higher model number, the T30 actually sits between iRiver's T10 and T20 players (reviewed here and here). Like the T20, it's intended to be a compact fashion statement, but with space for a AAA battery, it's designed to offer a very long play duration, as per the T10.

Cisco Systems has signed a deal to acquire network memory start-up Nemo Systems for $12.5m in cash. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and expected to close by the end of October.

NTL and Telewest have confirmed that they are to merge. But while the companies are "bigging up" the deal as creating a "new competitive force in the UK's communications and entertainment sectors", there are fears that thousands of jobs will be lost as part of the tie-up.

The draft telecomns reform bill released by the House Commerce Committee last week would ban fixed or wireless carriers from limiting access to content and applications, which would make it difficult for wireless carriers to keep their walled gardens.

The GSM Association last week silently created a whole new mobile internet, on the back of an agreement with American company NeuStar. It will offer Root Domain Name System (DNS) services to more than 680 global GSM mobile operators.

It's all go in the wonderful world of movie polls, and hot on the butt-naked heels of last week's revelation that the pool romp scene between Elizabeth Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan was the worst screen rumpy-pumpy ever, we have the news that Star Wars has claimed the best film music crown.

Virus writers have created a Trojan which uses an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Office to take over Windows PCs. The Hesive Trojan can be disguised as a Microsoft Access file. Once opened in Access, infected .mdb files take advantage of a five-month old buffer overflow flaw in Microsoft's Jet Database Engine software to seize control of vulnerable machines.

Having lauded the arrival of legal music download services likes Apple's iTunes for saving it from online piracy, the music industry is now complaining that the digital domain is not sufficiently recompensing artists.

Symantec continued its seemingly relentless acquisition spree on Monday with the purchase of security compliance firm BindView for $209m. The all-cash transaction, which is subject to regulatory and BindView shareholder approvals, is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2006.

Dell's direct model has paid big dividends once again as the company decided to host an anti-Sun Microsystems campaign directly on its own servers instead of Sun systems. It's either crow or dog food, but something unwholesome is being eaten this week in Round Rock.